Abstract:
Dr. Prasad Bidaye is a member of Indigenous Resistance (IR), a decentralized and globally dispersed arts and activist collective. In this presentation, he will look at IR’s recent work across multiple media forms, including dub recordings, short films, dialogical writings, photo essays, and social media interventions. One of the common threads across these selections of IR’s work is their outernationalist vision. Adapted from Jamaican sound system culture, the concept of outernationalism is an overtly political mode of transnationalism. It parallels Arundhati Roy’s “globalization of dissent” as a counter-narrative to celebratory, capitalist-friendly forms of globalization discourse. Outernationalism is also conceptualized here as an extrapolation of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic. While Gilroy foregrounds the networks and exchanges between Black, African, and Caribbean communities across the world since the Middle Passage, IR’s outernationalism focuses on the relationships, dialogues, and collaborations between subaltern, marginalized peoples - especially people marginalized through ongoing histories of modern European colonialism and its political descendants. The key difference is that outernationalism is not limited to Gilroy’s singular racial and ethnic focus. Ultimately, the outernationalist methods and aesthetics in IR’s work enables two sets of critical interventions for transnational and diasporic theory: 1) they challenge Eurocentric forms of transnationalism which typically operate on a Black/White or Western/Non-Western binary and 2) they focus on the cross-cultural spaces of creativity and collaboration between communities involved in multiple anti-colonial struggles, recognizing that each struggle is stronger when doubly engaged with others.